A Bicycle

I remember myself at four and a half years old.  My father, mother, my sister Hila and I    were then living in Kiev.  Dad had promised to give me for my birthday a long coveted tricycle. But alas, I don't know if the money was not enough, or my parents didn't want to clutter up our apartment, but I didn't get the tricycle. The joy of my 5th birthday was overshadowed by this, despite my father's assurances that he would buy it as soon as possible. Exactly two weeks later the war started, and we left for the east - 120 kilometers on foot, then in a car, and finally in a boxcar of a train. On a side of the boxcar was written: 40 men or 8 horses. In fact, no one considered how many of us were in the car. People were sitting and standing next to each other. Everyone wanted to leave as soon as possible and get away from the war. Life went on a path in which one does not dream of a bicycle or a trike.

When I started working in the profession of geodesy in Kiev I was seldom at home and even then of short duration because my job was in the expeditions. Geodesy in general is field work. We were sent to different places in which we had to make measurements for the purpose of mapping, surveying, positioning for construction, and putting up signs for navigation . We were in demand and our next job could be unpredictable, especially with projects for the military. When my daughters were born, and mindful of my own disappointment, I bought for them a bike as soon as they had grown up to the height of its saddle.  Somehow they were not so attracted to this type of fun, but in spite of that I encouraged them in this matter as it was a healthy and affordable pastime. When Inna, the eldest, celebrated her 18th birthday and I, respectively, my 42nd, I happened to see a good sports bike in a shop and bought it for her as a birthday present. It was a pure luck as to buy anything good in the USSR was a problem and a challenge.

She was delighted, and even rode it on a several-day trip to Karelia. Unfortunately, she felt there and hurt herself, so my wife and I anxiously drove to Moscow to meet her when she got off the train from Karelia. It was not too bad, just a few bruises and a broken bike. The bruises healed, and I fixed the bike. Nevertheless, her enthusiasm died. The bike stood alone in its place in the corridor. Then I came up with a bold idea.

Waiting until Saturday, my day off, I got up at two o'clock in the morning and dragged the bike into the street to learn to ride. At this time, the streets were empty and no one saw my clumsy attempts to ride. It was tough. Once I tore the skin on my leg so that the scar is visible even now. Unfortunately, in Russia at that time, Pond's Extract wasn't available to alleviate my wounds (Mark Twain, “Taming the Bicycle”). Two hours later, I was exhausted enough to sleep through the rest of the night until almost lunchtime.

The next night I repeated the escapade, and a miracle happened! I rode half a kilometer on our street and never fell. True, the street was not very wide and I barely had room for a ride, but it was still a very satisfying accomplishment. Several times I repeated the trip to secure the skills and then dashed through the town. I decided to go to my garage. The garage was located five kilometers from my home. I usually got there by tram and travelling to and from by tram takes half an hour. By bicycle - less than twenty minutes. And it was much more convenient not to have to wait for the tram. So I became a cyclist!

Several years passed and I immigrated to Israel. There new immigrants were given money for the first few months. Money was so scarce that the local people that I talked to did not believe that it was possible to survive on that amount. Now I do not believe it even myself, but then I did. If I had to go to Tel Aviv, I would try to accumulate a number of errands to run in one trip by bus, since the bus fees seriously affected my budget. Often I just walked there on foot; the round-trip was 12 kilometers. After a few weeks I decided to buy a bike. When I managed to scrape the necessary sum together to buy it, my horizons expanded widely. The bicycle was a "Peugeot", and it was a great acquisition. It was not a problem to visit almost any place in Israel (the whole country is about half the size of Nova Scotia). So, until I found a job, I didn't use the bus anymore.

The bicycle also took a special place in my life as a therapeutic agent against stress. Without language and friends in a foreign country, I experienced a constant state of tension. And then, when the unbearable anguish oppressed my heart, I sat on my bike, rode 30-40 kilometers, and afterward it seemed possible to continue to live.

Ira, my youngest daughter, the one who came to Israel with me, lived in a kibbutz. There she learned the language and worked in the fields. For the Passover celebration, she invited me to come and join with locals. The kibbutz was located 120 kilometers away, in the Negev desert. I decided to bike. Since it was Saturday, the highway was almost empty and one would not be afraid of traffic. For the trip, I took a dozen oranges.

I left early, at dawn. Once on the highway, I felt a gentle breeze in my face but did not attach any importance to this. On the contrary, I thought it would not be so hot. It turned out that even the lightest breeze significantly reduces one’s speed. Instead of the expected five to six hours, I would have to pedal much longer. Okay, what is our age! (This is a Russian expression meaning you are not old enough to give up!) I pressed on, stopping from time to time to quench my thirst with an orange. By midday, I had run out of oranges. I was fraught with problems. No water, no shelter around to be seen. The sun began to bake me. I was also hungry, but that feeling I was used to, however, I was  without water in the desert, and had to pedal hard against the wind.

After a while, I suspected that I had strayed from the right road. I was riding along by  a fence with barbed wire.  I pulled out a map and tried to figure out where I had gone astray. The map was so small that it was almost impossible to understand. I realized that I was on the way to Gaza. If I moved in this direction a bit further, I could be in a situation of “no return". But this was the only road going south, and around me, as far as you could see, was only sand. I rode on in the hope of finding an intersection with sign posts. Thank God, an intersection soon appeared, but without signs. I turned to the east, hoping to get on the right road. Meanwhile, my thirst tormented me deeply. The highway was empty and there were no houses around. Well, I thought, I'll go as far as I can.

Suddenly, I spotted on the shoulder a two-liter bottle of Coca-Cola with a colorless liquid inside. It looked like water, but who actually knew? I unscrewed the lid, and sniffed. No smell. I put a drop on my finger, and sniffed again. Finally, I licked it. Water! Well, if I did not quench my thirst, I would not make it. I drank. I thought, if three hours later nothing bad happens, I'll be lucky. To find in the desert a water bottle is a miracle, isn't it? I hurried on, mentally humming a song from some advertising I had heard. On the left side of the road there seemed to be a strip of trees. Hence, there would be shade where I could rest. Slowing down, I see that there is not only some shade, but also grass. A little prickly, but it does not matter; I'm not a princess. I laid down on the grass, closed my eyes and fell into a deep sleep.

I had a dream, or should I say a nightmare!  Someone was whipping me on the cheek. Well, I thought, what nonsense! Even my dream is unkind.  This beast whipped and lashed me to no end. Finally, I realize that it was, alas, no longer a dream, but I still couldn’t open my eyes. Finally, I opened one and froze in horror. A few inches from my face, was a writhing snake, and beside it some other monster. Another second or two, and I had opened both eyes and saw that monster was vigorously flapping its wings, hitting me once more and at last soared into the air.

Recovering from this terrifying scene, I was able to restore the picture. It turned out that next to me was a big lizard. She had spotted a hawk. The lizard had tried to hide by crawling under me. But the hawk was alert and managed to grab it. Trying to capture a lizard, the hawk had flapped its wings, slapping me in the face, and what I mistook for a snake was the wriggling lizard's tail. After this brutal battle in which I was a random victim, only the tail lay on the grass.

Still somewhat stunned by experiencing this drama, I perched on my Rosinante and went on. When nearly at the entrance to Kibbutz I saw a beautiful snake (this time a real one), creeping along the highway. Suddenly, out of nowhere, appeared an oncoming car which ran over it. He did it intentionally, slightly changing direction to hit it for sure. I regretted at that moment that the bottle I had found wasn’t a Molotov cocktail!

The rest of the journey was without incident. The whole trip took ten to twelve hours. Ira gave me a bed where I rested before the celebration, and then the traditional Jewish ceremony "Seder" in honor of the Exodus began. Everything was new to me. It was a pity that I couldn't establish a dialogue with the local people. My vocabulary was then at the level of "Hello, how are you"; it was an interesting experience anyway. After a night's sleep, I returned home. The wind was still the same gentle breeze, but now at my back. The road was familiar, and after six hours I was home without a problem.

Now it would be logical if I said that I was very grateful to the inventors of the wheel, and, in particular, the bicycle.

Doing Business in the USSR

There were ways of providing business in the Soviet Union which are difficult to explain to people who have grown up in the world of free market and conditional, but nevertheless, democracy. I'm going to tell you a true story. It takes only one short paragraph to say it in Russian. We will see how long it will be making it clear for you in English. Let's start. So, what is the basic difference between the soviet system of the economic management and the Western one? Please don't expect to read an economic essay. I'm no good in this matter. I'm going to talk about my personal experience.

In the USSR, all business enterprises and organizations belonged to the State. Formally, small businesses were legal, but they were taxed so highly that they were doomed to fail before they started.

Why did the government want full control of all active life of the country? First of all, for ideological reasons. The motto of communism is “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”. In a socialist society, there should be no poor, no rich. It doesn't let boss-bloodsuckers get rich by exploiting slaves who have no rights. So, how were they going to manage a complicated business without capitalist sharks?

They established a table of salaries for the whole country. It said what amount of money everybody would get according to his or her skills and the kind of job. It also limited income of the top management leaders to only two-three times more than a common laborer.

Another reason for full control of enterprise was their attitude toward competition. It was assumed that competition is an unhealthy corollary of the free market. We don't need it, as the conscience of the Soviet peoples was much higher than the Western working people. All of them will work honestly and without urging. In order to avoid competition, manufacturers shouldn't produce similar products.

To organize such a system, they established a planning ministry with branches in all republics. It planned ahead for five years who would produce everything and when – from weaponry to heavy building equipment, transportation, food, houses, bed sheets, kitchen hardware and textbooks, everything the country would need.

Such a huge and complicated system, even if itself error free, could work only in an ideal human society where everybody works honestly, cleverly and wholeheartedly.

But as we know, the mentality of people can't be changed just because of the replacement of authority. The same as a thousand years ago, everybody acts in the best interest of himself, which does not necessarily suit the rest. What changed mostly was the verbiage and phraseology.

Centralized planning on an enormous scale can't provide good performance with needed accuracy. (Some economy analysts said that for planning accurately at that time,there wasn't enough computer power. It would take a few years to calculate the plan for just one year. However, now supercomputers can help to produce such a detailed plan in very reasonable time). As a result, there was a permanent deficit of everything. Without competition, the quality of goods and services was beyond all criticism. The black market was always available, but prices for most people were unaffordable.

The manufacturers in turn tried to produce as few goods as they could and laborers had almost no benefits from making additional efforts. After receiving a long term plan, they studied it thoroughly. It included a product mix, funds, raw materials, equipment, and prices on their products. Then they made a lot of efforts to wrest better conditions (fewer goods and better supply) from the planning department. There have been always battling about it. Planning departments, knowing that manufacturers would fight them, put in their plans more than was needed to try to get the maximum. But even facilitated plans were never accomplished completely.

In the years of détente and lessening of international tensions, hope started in cooperation between West and East. There were talks about Two Worlds Convergence.

At that time, somebody told a joke. American and Soviet plants exchanged technical managers to see what each of them could bring back to their country to improve their own business. After the first day, the American boss called the Russian guy and asked him how it was for him. The Russian, with a lot of pep, replied: “Very good, sir. There were seventeen clients coming to place an order. I was lucky to send all of them away!” In the Soviet plant, the boss asked the same question of the American manager. He cheerfully reported: “I wish to be so lucky in my own country. I've got signatures on twenty-eight contracts in one day!

As you can imagine, both of them were severely reprimanded. Their home experiences were useless abroad.

I suppose that after you have read this far, you've got a basic idea about the Soviet business system. Now, I'm going to tell you my little story as an illustration of it.

During the time I was working in the town of Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountains, our company was providing surveys for development and building. Our main customer, an institute of development, asked us to survey and make a map of underground communications – water and sewage pipes, electric and telephone cables.

Here I need another deviation to explain the intricacy of that problem.

Of course, it is clear to everybody that you have to know the exact location of every single pipe or cable so as not to damage them while digging or for repair or development. The simplest way is to put them on the map at the time of building. But by bad tradition the builders ignored that task or did it carelessly. Later, if you have to find a particular pipe, you have to dig a hole much bigger than needed, as you don't know the exact location. That is why the institute asked us to map all communications in the town of one million people. But it was almost an impossible task.

In the best tradition of our routine, we refused to take this contract. However, our client was strong and powerful. To resolve the differences, we were summoned to Moscow to our ministry. As my boss didn't like to be treated as a little boy, he sent me. Well, personally, I was in favor of taking that order, but the best interest of our company demanded otherwise and so I went.

On the plane, my opponent, Michael Shmelev, and I were sitting side by side. We were acquainted for a long time and had a good personal relationship. After having exchanged news, we started to talk about our jobs. This is what Michael told me:

“Once on Friday after lunch, when all of us were anticipating the coming weekend, the director of our institute called me up and told me that in the Regional Party Office, they expected a formal certificate about the amount of meliorated land in the region for five years. The certificate had to be put on the desk of the First Secretary (actual boss of the region, the size of an American state) on Monday at 10:00 a.m.

What a misfortune! I had to call all hands on deck and assign everybody to calculate the areas of melioration. People naturally started to grumble as all family plans for the weekend became ruined. But there wasn't much that could be done about it. Soon all desks and even the floor were covered with maps and other materials and people with rulers, planimeters and calculators measured the areas. It took us up to 10 p.m. every day till Monday to finish.

At the appointed time, I was in the office of the Master, the First Party Secretary of the Chelyabinsk Region. He thoroughly studied our certificate, signed by my director and me and said: «I have no doubt that you worked hard and your number is correct. However, can't you see - how do I put it gently - it doesn't represent adequately our efforts and honest concern about improving our valuable arable land? People in Moscow can misinterpret us. I hope you don't mind if we adjust it a little bit. »

Then, without waiting for my reply or even looking at me, he took his pen and added a zero on the right side of our so scrupulously calculated number. My jaw dropped in amazement and my mind gnawed at the thought of how 30 people had worked so hard and wasted their weekend!

After arriving in Moscow and meeting with our supervisor, he went to the meeting with me for moral support. The minister asked Michael to explain the problem to all. There were a few people unknown to me sitting in the room. Michael told his story very well. Everybody understood the importance of knowing the exact locations of underground utilities. Then I was invited to explain our position. I started to talk, but I hadn't time to finish my first sentence as the boss interrupted: "Did you come here to charm us with your eloquence? If you do not take that contract, we will give you such an enema that your town will be left without water for two weeks."

The ears of the common foul-mouthed man would have wilted by listening to the following speech of that top ranked communist functionary. At that point, the court was closed.

What happened next? But of course, we didn’t sign the contract. Interruptions of the water supply in our town happened, as it did every year, but from different causes. Ah well, in sympathy to my failure, our supervisor promised me to send us some long-awaited equipment. And he kept his word to my great surprise. That's my personal illustration about doing business in the USSR.

Motherland and Death

It is natural that people love the places where they were born and grew up. Curiously enough for me, these sentimental feelings have something in common with those not so obvious ones, as death, for example.

I remember how being a child, I was shocked when I learned that all of us are mortals and I was scared to death even to think about it (pardon my clumsy pun). Later on, as it usually happens, this fear was forgotten, and the sad ending of life was seldom recalled, mostly in jokes.

But once, in my first English book, “Charlotte's Web”, the wonderful children's novel by E. B. White, the protagonist Charlotte, the spider, made me think it over. At one point, close to the end of the story, she explains to another character that she is preparing for death. The time for that comes and that's normal – to die. I think it was a very wise way to tell children about the inevitability and normality (so far) of death.

The gears in my mind slowly started to crunch and little by little I came to the same conclusion and heartily accepted it. The result was worth the effort.

What is the connection between death and love of Motherland? It's quite straightforward. Mental work in a chosen direction can make miracles in our mindset.

I loved my Motherland and I was ready to give it all my energy. But soon, at the beginning of my career, I realized that the Motherland didn't appreciate my love and gave nothing in return. It didn't need my initiative, but only blind obedience. Many of the people around complaining about the same, but nobody (well, almost nobody) wished to take a risk and try to change this grim reality as it was dangerous to demonstrate even a token of opposition. So in spite of my love for the Motherland, I wanted desperately to leave it as soon as possible.

When it finally became feasible, I started to work on my feelings. How could I avoid becoming sick from nostalgia?

I've imagined that I'm from another planet. I don't want to be involved in any local showdowns. I like the Earth, it is a beautiful planet and I can live almost anywhere on it. It has proved useful, my experience from long expeditions, from living in different towns, moving from one national republic to another. I can go to a completely new place, get to know local people, make new friends, and after a short while, I feel at home.

In one movie, an American boy, visiting Japan, fallen in love with a Japanese girl. They decided to get married and to live in her place. The girl asked: "Won't you be homesick?" The boy answered: "Homesick? No, not at all. My home is where I hang my hat." So, I feel about the same.

By the way, before leaving Russia, I had to consider losing my friends and all of my possessions acquired over thirty-seven working years. Only books, very dear to me, were about a couple of thousands.

After twenty years of emigration, I still miss my friends, but material things... I was surprised when I realized just in a plane, how little those things was worth even mentioning.

I remember a funny case, which happened in my being in Israel. Early in the morning, I walked to my work and suddenly met Efim, an acquaintance. He was a man of middle age with whom I had attended a course. He was very depressed and told me that he was going home from a night shift. He was working in a post office, sorting correspondence. The job was exhausting, the manager was rude without appreciation of human dignity. Efim was desperate to find a more decent job and couldn't see an exit from his situation.

To cheer him up a little bit I suggested: "Listen, Efim, imagine that you are a spy. Your bosses sent you to this country and told you to grow accustomed to the place, learn the language very well and find the best job you can get. Then wait for further instructions. In the meantime, I'll ask my boss if he can hire you."

My boss has hired Efim as a laborer. It was already better than his last job. Then in three months, Efim found a job in Tel-Aviv municipality in his profession as a hydro engineer. I didn't know (neither did Efim) if my advise helped, but we entertained ourselves that it did.

So, I've concluded, that if you want to change your mind about any serious subject, but it is hard to give up the previous mindset, you might use any tool known to you, for example, detachment from your own self. It means to pretend that you are somebody else, giving advise to yourself. Or ask for advise from your real or imaginary hero like Jesus Christ, or Abraham Lincoln or your father. It is possible, I'm sure, just do it.

People of Siberia

In the early 70s a friend of mine, Tolya Lukin, and I got into the habit of fishing together. On Friday evenings, after work, we would go by boat to the Volga river, drop anchor near a fairway, sink a basket with a lure and start to catch breams. We would fish all night long. It's not a hard job, as bites were rare, so we were talking. For us it was even more interesting than fish.

Tolya's origin is Siberia, and I told him my impression of it, as I lived there in time of war, in 1941-1946. We were evacuated there because our own town, Kiev, was occupied by Germans. The village, to which we were sent, Novonikolaevka, was so-so, no better, no worse than the others in Novosibirsk region. Most of the natives were quite well off. Every household had 2 or 3 cows, about 20 to 30 sheep, pigs, chickens and other animals, and a big vegetable garden. To share their wealth with newcomers they considered stupid and wrong. So they didn't share. We weren't trained to live their way and weren't prepared for such a drastic change for the worse, so we got by as we could. Some of us just died from malnutrition. The worst came when people arrived from Leningrad, after being freed from the German's blockage. These people were different even from us. Not only were they emaciated, but they were exhausted mentally. They behaved in an inadequate manner – hiding food under the pillow, speaking oddly. They were highly educated people and their language was a standard of Russian from tzar's time, when St. Petersburg, now Leningrad, was a capital of Russia. Every move they made amused locals and was discussed in a mocking way in the presence of the victims. Such hostility could be partially explained by the way they came themselves to Siberia.

Most of the local people came to this place not voluntarily. When Stalin started the collectivization campaign, he persecuted severely any opposition. Many people were shot, put in jail, or exiled to the North, Siberia and the like. It was very hard for them to start a new life, they lost a lot on the way to success. And they took offense against outsiders, whoever they were. My older sister, Rachel, was in grade 6 at the school, and she told us that one of the boys in her class came close to the map, put his finger on Novosibirsk (the Siberian capital) and said: "I don't mind if Germans come up to here." It was like he was repeating what he heard at home.

When I finished my story, Tolya said: "Actually I was born near that place. In any case, I recognize our morals and tempers."Then he told me his story. "At that time all the villagers paid regular taxes but had to pay a so-called “Supply of Red Army Fund”. As they never had any money, (it was just subsistence farming), they could pay by products – grain, meat, butter, eggs, wool, etc.

Once their village refused to pay. All demands and threats they just ignored. Then one day in beginning of November, before a national holiday, an officer came to the village, empowered by the NKVD (from which later branched out KGB) and with a platoon armed with rifles. All adults from the village were gathered and arranged so that they were facing the river and behind them were the soldiers. The officer gave a short speech about everybody's patriotic debt in war time and concluded: Those who are going to pay – step out. The rest – take two steps ahead. It was November, the river was already full of sludge ice. Some of the people got out and were treated by tax collectors. The rest were told to walk into the river, up to their ankles. After one minute the officer repeated his order. Again some left, the rest had to walk deeper into the icy water, up to their knees. Similar orders were pronounced a few times more. The most courageous gave up only when they were up to their necks in the water."

Here, I'd like to explain what it means to spend a few minutes in icy water. Once I read that astronauts had to pass a test – to keep feet up to the knees in icy water for four minutes. It appeared to me too easy, as I, myself, was twice in the icy water (not willingly), but I don't remember anything to compare to the heroic deed required for astronauts. I decided to make another try. I filled up the bathtub with cold water, measured the temperature, it was 4 degrees. Not a zero, but enough to get an idea. I sat on the edge, feet in the water. After only one minute I decided to stop the experiment. No-no, don't take me wrong. If it would be a test for joining the astronaut's group I would stand it to the end. But I didn't have so great a stimulus. It wasn't just too cold. It was painful. It was so much pain that I was afraid of the consequences. But those people from the village, they were in the icy water up to the neck, and more than for four minutes!

A couple years ago I found on the Web a forum of the near town in Siberia. I wrote to them, told my story, that I spent five years of my childhood in grim time in our country. I told them that I didn't want to chew again and again on those circumstances, I just want to know how they live now, what changes were made in the area. I wanted to become their friend. Nobody answered me. They didn't become even a bit more associative.

Dombai

I have homework to do: to describe thoughts and emotions evoked by some article of my possession. It is a very hard task, as I can't find such an article. Almost all my articles left in Russia. But I have some pictures of the past. Here: a yellowish photo of a little cabin, covered by snow.

1956. Four of us, students, were awarded two weeks in Dombai, famous skiing resort in Caucus mountains. Those two weeks remain in my memory as the happiest in my life. Life in the USSR was, in general, gloomy. People were poor and hungry, struggling for survival. The luck of four of us was hard to overestimate.

First, we came by train to the town of Batalpashinsk, from which we had to take a bus to Teberda and from there a shuttle bus suppose to bring us to the camp. We hadn’t traveled much by ourselves, so we were excited to see different people, different customs.

On the town square we spotted a guy selling ice-cream. He had a box hanging on the belt over his neck with some cones on the top of the box. We delegated one of us to buy some. While we were waiting on the side, our friend obviously got into trouble. We came over to him and he told us that he gave a 100 ruble bill for the four cones, expecting 80 rubles change. But the seller refused to give it. We were lucky as there was a policeman in the square. We turned to him for help. The policeman asked the vendor: "Why you didn't give them the change?" "I didn't and I will not give it to them on principle", he answered and started to put the cones inside his box.

Then he just left, leaving us without our change and puzzled. We didn't even have the opportunity to learn such interesting principles. The policeman shrugged his shoulders and left as well.

We came to the camp and were put in a cabin, all four in one room. Then we got instructions for tomorrow’s training, were given our skis, boots and costumes. After formalities were finished we came for dinner. It was included in the service. That was another surprise. We had more than enough food! And sugar was free on the table!

I don't remember meals but breakfasts. Rice or mashed potatoes, a small piece of sausage, 20 grams of butter and coffee. We started to figure out how sweet coffee should be. Somebody put five teaspoons of sugar, some twelve. After a few days everybody agreed that nine was optimum.

The training was great. We enjoyed it from the first minute to the last, four hours a day. The hardest was to compact fresh snow on the track. We had to ascend by sidesteps about an 800 meter slope at least twice before it was possible to ski. There weren’t modern facilities – ski lifts, tamping machines, etc. But it was a delight for us anyway.

The surrounding mountains were gorgeous. Covered by dazzling snow, sharp peaks were so beautiful! No surprise that about each of them were songs which we learned from veterans and sang with them together. The air was so clean that the slightest impurity was intolerable. Once, the tank of the electric generator was refilled and some diesel was spilled on the ground. For a couple of days we could smell it from kilometers away.

The stars in the night sky were so big and bright! If you didn't see them in the mountains you missed a spectacular view. It evokes indescribable emotion. The falling snow was another miracle. It was relatively warm, snowflakes were huge, maybe an inch in diameter, or even larger. With no wind they fell slowly vertically. You could watch them individually from high above, flowing down to the ground. The last couple of days it was unusual snowfall – thick and continuous. Telephone poles were concealed under it. Our marvelous vacation was finished, but we were unable to get out. Even a tractor couldn't come through from Teberda. We were advised to go by skis. We didn't mind. To walk 20 kilometers took us a whole day. We were exhausted, but happy.

When the time came to buy tickets for the train to go home, I couldn't find enough money. We sat down and thought hard what to do. But happened another miracle. We had to return our equipment and clothes, and I absent-mindlessly checked the pockets. Somehow I have not done it before. To our delight I took out of it a 25 ruble bill, just what I needed for the ticket. Somebody who was wearing it before me forgot it. We hadn't enough money left for food and for the couple of days that we spent on the train we didn't eat, but it was a minor problem. The whole adventure was unforgettable. That is why I have kept the old picture for more than 50 years.

Hunger

War World II started in the USSR at 4 am on June 22, 1941. Our town, Kiev, was bombed at the same time and was occupied by Germans on September 19. In the meantime, everybody who wanted to run away to the east was looking for transportation. The trains were busy with military transits and were mostly not available for civilians. My father David, a 39 year old high school teacher, was mobilized to evacuate children from his school to Siberia. I don't know what happened to the kids’ families. Probably he was to take east only those whose parents weren't able to take care of them.

We - the kids, my parents, my 12 year old sister Rachel and me, a 5 year old boy- left by foot with only the luggage we could carry ourselves. Rachel was lightly wounded in her heel by a little bomb splinter. She was afraid to tell anybody about that, so she suffered silently while it healed by itself. We walked 120 kilometers. After that we got horse wagons, then a train car designed for cattle and finally a passenger carriage. Our trains (we had to change them many times) were stopped often giving priority to military ones. Many nights we spent in places not suited to human beings. Finally we came to a small town ,Asino, in Siberia. The authorities took care of the school children and sent our family to a village ,Novonikolaevka, of about 3000 inhabitants in the middle of the taiga, 50 kilometers north. My father had to be a principal of a local school. A few weeks later he was sent to the front and we never saw him again. His friend in the platoon sent us a letter that in April, 1944 he died. Being ambushed by Ukrainian bandits he lit his truck on fire and burned himself so as not to be tortured by them. They wanted independence for Ukraine and for the sake of it fought the Red Army on the Nazis side, at the same time killing thousands of civilians who didn't support them. Today they would be called terrorists.

It is interesting that now Stephan Bandera, the leader of those thugs, was proclaimed a hero of Ukrainian people. The statues of him were erected, streets named after him. Recently Polish authorities have expressed deep displeasure of those actions, noticing that banderovtsy (members of S. Bandera's gangs) killed many Polish people as well. As Karl Marx said: “History repeats itself twice, first as tragedy, second as farce“. Indeed.

We lived in a small house allotted to a school principal. It was a simple loghouse with moss between the logs for insulation. An inner porch separated the entrance from the dwelling part, which included the kitchen and “gornica”, - a living room and a bedroom combined. A stove in the kitchen made of bricks and clay, took up most of the space. It was designed for cooking and heating. The flat top of it provided sleeping space for a few people. It was very useful in Siberian winters, where frost of -50C can stay for a long period. Under the floor was a cellar for storing potatoes and other provisions. Next to the house was a vegetable garden and an outhouse at the far end of it.

Electricity was not available in remote places like our village. For light we used a kerosine lamp. Kerosine was in short supply (what wasn't?). Instead of it we used splinters. To prepare them for the evening was my job. When you are 5 or 6 years old it could be a challenge. Once I chopped off a little piece of my thumb using an axe.

There was no radio in our village as well. Newspapers reached us, but only once in a while. The most reliable source of information were the letters, those which finally found recipients. All letters were censored and usually big parts of them were stroked out with black ink.

However, the biggest problem of all was hunger. Constant, cruel, humiliating human dignity hunger. You become humiliated because pangs of it don't let you concentrate on what you have to do, you feel unjustly deprived. It hurts even more than physical pain.

Food was available only on the black market, but we had no money for it. The state distributed ration cards for bread, oil, and sugar for a nominal price. For working people the norm was 800 grams a day, for the rest – half or even less than that.

It sounds like a lot of bread. For example, now I eat between 50 and 100 grams a day. But I eat a lot of other products as well. In war time other products were occasional luxuries. People who had just enough bread and potatoes were lucky. The bread itself was very bad quality, hardly edible.

The bread was brought to the village once a week, but at an unknown time or day. People were guided by rumors and on the eve of the expected day, rushed to form a line before the store's door, as the bread usually was not enough for everyone. It often happened that rumors were false and people wasted their time in vain and the next day the procedure was repeated.

Many years later my mother told me a story about those days. After spending a few nights waiting for bread, she was lucky to get her ration. Exhausted morally and physically, lost in a fog and dragging her feet, she was carrying bread home for her children. Being unable to resist the temptation, she nipped off a crumb of the crust. Then one more. Then another one. Then she thought it was her own share and ate a bit more. Close to home she noticed that the whole piece was almost gone. It was impossible to show up with such a small bit and she finished it before opening the door. Shaking of horror and humiliation, she told us that bread hadn't arrived again. She kept this story to herself for twenty years having no courage to tell it to us.

The hardest time for us was spring and beginning of summer, when last year 's supply was gone, but a new one had not grown up yet. The main source of food, except bread, was our garden. I still remember how good the vegetables were from it, their look, smell and taste still unsurpassed.

Potatoes were so large – I used to carry them in both arms, as firewood. Tomatoes, when you broke them in half, showed sparkling crystals, similar to sugar lumps. And they were sweet, not quite as sugar, but still very tasty. Cucumbers were covered by sharp pimples and a white-bluish powder which disappeared after you touched them. We used to strike them along their body to break these pimples, so they would not prick our mouths. Vegetables couldn't be stored for a long time, so we made pickles of them, of tomatoes, cucumbers and of cabbage. Cabbage also was great, sweet and juicy. But the best part of it for me (still is) the core. Carrots, well, they were just delicious. Onions and garlic added a great deal to the table. Only problem was – we weren't able to produce vegetables enough, as it was too hard a job. Water for it we had to bring from the river in buckets. It was a couple hundred meters away with a steep bank. My mother worked to exhaustion and I was too small. Although I worked with all my energy, it was almost negligible.

I have noticed that after our return till now I've never tried such great vegetables. I guess the reason for that was the exceptional soil and climate of that region. Then, we let all crops ripen to their best condition and didn't use chemicals (simply we just hadn't any).

The first things in summer came to our table not from the garden, but from the wild. It began in May with nettles and sorrel. Both of them made delicious soups, appreciated even now. From the forest in fall we got mushrooms, berries, and pinenuts. To pick mushrooms and berries, the process was mostly individual, known to many Canadians very well. It is worth it to tell a bit more about harvesting pinenuts. They grew on Siberian (stone) pine. The adult tree was usually huge. By local people it was considered to be a noble one. It gave unrotting wood. At the time, a water pipe had recently been discovered. Laid underground about 200 years before, it was in pretty good condition. No less than for timber, it was valued for nuts, a nutritious and delicious food. From olden times, there was established amongst neighboring villages, a possession of particular trees in the taiga. Every village decided when the nuts were ripe enough for harvesting and made an expedition for them. The cones grew high on the trees and were unreachable from the ground. But when they were ripe, they fell by themselves if just shaken off. So, the men cut another appropriately long and wide tree, made of it a battering ram and hit the pine many times, until the cones stopped falling. The cones were big and heavy. People brought them home just for fun. But most of the cones were heated by fire on the spot to roast the nuts. Seed scales opened by heating and the ready nuts were put in sacks. The distribution of nuts went by the rules of the village. Collecting nuts or cutting pine trees by individuals was considered as theft of public assets and punishment was severe.

As now I can see, we had unused resources of food, but we were too ignorant to recognize them.

Not long ago I was talking to one Chinese person. He told me that once they watched a documentary movie about a Gulag labor camp. In spite of the narrator's story that people were dying of hunger in these camps, my interlocutor and his friends couldn't believe that.

''Why didn't you believe?'',I asked him, ''It is true, really.'' "In the footage we watched, we noticed a lot of flies hovering around and just sitting on the faces of prisoners. It is some protein, you know. But the guys just ignored them. So, they weren't hungry enough." For me this conversation became a lesson. Our squeamishness is not a thing to be proud of.

In 1945 the war was finished, but hunger was still there. In 1946 we returned from Siberia to Kiev and lines for bread in my town were even longer, for the whole night. We took turns with my mother. Once in a dismal shifting my mother, in an attempt to heighten my mood , said that the time would come when bread would be in abundance, and not just one kind of rye bread but even white. I revolted, ''Don't tell me tales! I'm not a little one anymore.''

Gradually, in ten-fifteen years, hunger subsided. The first time I ate enough was in 1955 in a summer camp of my college. I even remember the menu: borsch, kasha (a boiled buckwheat) with some meat and compote.